Dirty South Bureau

Today was a break from reporting but not a break from reality. Night before last my next-door neighbor was robbed at gunpoint, and tonight the police arrived- five cop cars flashing blue and red in the night. They had a suspect in the back of one car and I didn’t want to get close enough to find out who it was. I much prefer to remain invisible. I was hoping it wasn’t my neighbor, Clarence, who just got back from Houston. Not that I think that he robbed my neighbor- this is New Orleans and it doesn’t matter if you are innocent or not. Clarence is a young black man living in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood.

I have mixed feelings about crime here. The truth of the matter is that I am much more afraid of older gay men with small dogs than young black men. Demographics like the aforementioned older gay men are much more likely to make it so that I cannot live in whatever neighborhood I am in and thus are much more a threat to me. But I have never been mugged, so I am in no position to talk.

But this is the crux that we are in- if the neighborhood did not have crime, it would be taken over by yuppies. And the fact that the yuppies feel safe in our neighborhood is an assault on our lifestyles and identities. However insane it may be there was and is a certain attachment to the toughness and seediness that the Bywater used to have. No-one wants to get robbed or shot, but on the other hand none of us want yoga studios and dog spas either. Why is it so hard to find some middle ground?

I am reminded of what Zinn says about staying neutral on a moving train. Capitalism needs new markets, and urban renewal needs ghettoes to gentrify. And young white people like me and my friends are caught in the middle, both perpetrators and victims of gentrification.

It wasn’t Clarence- I talked to his folks. They live in a little gray shotgun across the street, one of two black families on the block. Daniel (his father) is talking about getting a big dog. He says if they try to rob him he’ll shoot the motherfuckers. Anne, his mother, sees more how much Clarence is a potential victim of the police. She says she told him to work or to move out, so that he won’t be hanging around getting into trouble. So Clarence works at Doerr furniture making fifty bucks a day cash. Some future.

Instead, the cops pulled all the young black men out of the little brick double a block down on the other side of Burgundy street. I watched them pull all of them out onto the street and felt helpless. I’m not into copwatch- for all I know they really have a reason to go in there. But I doubt it. If they’re looking for the guy who robbed my neighbor, he doesn’t live a block away, I can tell you that.

Is the Bywater coming back?

When rich people uptown say they want to keep crime down, they are saying that they don’t want poor black people to move back into town. And as much as many white radicals and liberals are in denial of it, the truth is that when the poor black people move back they bring crime with them.

This just isn’t a simple world. I can’t help it- I feel a little relieved at the mugging. Somehow the rhythm of this sort of trauma is a return to normality.

The cop cars haul off the kids. Young black men who will be traumatized in OPP and come out hard. This is what Anne wants to keep Clarence from.

America has the highest incarceration rate of any nation in the world, and Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate of any state, nearly half again the number of prisoners per capita than its nearest competitor, Texas.

I do the only thing that makes sense- I go out and drink.